SECURITY MEMO

SECURITY MEMO; Duct Tape: The Cure for All Ills

By CHRISTINE DIGRAZIA

Published: February 23, 2003

LIKE we need another excuse to buy duct tape.

What's it been, maybe just a few months since duct tape was last flying off store shelves? In October, the tape had a bigger comeback than Ozzy Osbourne when a Cincinnati doctor announced it was a better and less painful remedy than liquid nitrogen for wart removal. The head of the wart study said he didn't know for sure why it worked, but thought it may have something to do with irritation of the immune system.

Hmm. Is there anyone among us who has been immune to the most recent irritation from our nation's new security gurus? Thanks to the Department of Homeland Handymen, everyone in the United States has at least once in the last two weeks asked themselves: ''What? Would it hurt to have a roll of duct tape handy in case I survive a nuclear blast?'' The answer appears to be ''Duct and Cover,'' a slogan eerily familiar to any baby boomer who ever spent time cowering under a desk in elementary school.

Actually, husbands, who live by the credo, ''It ain't broke, it just needs duct tape,'' were watching the news reports very carefully to see whether all those people filling their shopping carts with duct tape were finding new ways to use the stuff that they could share. Hole in a sock? Duct tape! Frayed carpet? Duct tape! Cover a broken light switch? Duct tape!

I had a friend whose father used the tape to plug a hole in her bathing cap when she was a kid and, having learned from a pro, later used it herself to repair her 1963 Volkswagen Beetle.

Time for a pop quiz. Please answer the following questions:

What's a quick way to patch a hole in a bagpipe?

Name an efficient method to keep water from splashing through an opening in your car's floor.

How do you repair a hose?

How do you attach the school principal to a wall?

If you failed to answer ''duct tape'' to any of the above, you obviously need to learn more, especially about the last question. A school principal in Medicine Lodge, Kan., was indeed taped to a wall by his students after they met his challenge of reading 400,000 pages before the end of the year.

Handy stuff this duct tape, but what exactly is it? Here's a primer. Duct tape is a cloth tape coated with a polyethylene resin on one side and a very sticky rubber-based adhesive on the other. Unlike other tapes, the fabric backing gives duct tape strength yet allows it to be easily torn. It is commonly thought that duct tape was first manufactured in 1942 in an ''Army green'' color for the military during World War II. The original use was to keep the moisture out of ammunition cases. It became known as ''duck tape'' because it was waterproof, like a duck. Resourceful G.I.'s used it to fix guns, Jeeps, aircraft and other things.

After the war, the tape was used to connect heating and air conditioning duct work, and the color was changed to silver to match the ducts. People started calling it duct tape.

Not too many people know that in 1998, however, duct tape failed ''quite catastrophically'' as a duct sealant, according to a three-month study of sealing materials by the Department of Energy. Nonetheless, dozens of Web sites (Ducttapeclub.com; Ducttapefashion.com), books and even a calendar (''365 Days of Duct Tape Page-A-Day Calendar 2003,'') now celebrate the usefulness and even the humor of duct tape.

My father would have rolled his eyes over all of this fanfare. A World War II veteran with a passion for fixing things, he kept a roll of duct tape in his basement workshop and another in his bedroom, right on the dresser bureau near his pile of car and house keys. He said that in case of an emergency, he didn't want to have to go too far for the duct tape. When my husband and I started renovating my father's house after he passed away, the plumber and electrician were dumbfounded that the house's pipes and electrical wiring hadn't caused a catastrophe -- duct tape was everywhere.

One day before he died, my father sat on the den couch next to me. When he crossed his legs, I saw that the toes of his favorite slippers, their soft brown leather uppers and lamb's-wool innards, were wrapped with duct tape. I smiled at his security measure. Here was a guy who knew what duct tape was really for.